Written by John Lennon and Paul McCartney, the track “I Want to Hold Your Hand” was penned in response to a plea from Capitol Records for the band write a song that would hit with the American market. At the time the duo were writing in the basement of McCartney’s then girlfriend’s childhood home. They composed the song with Lennon recollecting,
“We wrote a lot of stuff together, one on one, eyeball to eyeball. Like in ‘I Want to Hold Your Hand,’ I remember when we got the chord that made the song. We were in Jane Asher’s house, downstairs in the cellar playing on the piano at the same time. And we had, ‘Oh you-u-u/ got that something …’ And Paul hits this chord and I turn to him and say, ‘That’s it!’ I said, ‘Do that again!’ In those days, we really used to absolutely write like that—both playing into each other’s noses.”
In 1963 the Fab Four recorded the song with four-track technology with 17 different takes. Demand for the single was high, with over one million advance orders for it being placed. “I Want to Hold Your Hand” was released at the height of Beatlemania, and the response was electric. A week after entering the charts, it knocked another Beatles tune, “She Loves Me” off of the top spot in the UK. It became the Christmas number one song of that year.
In the United States, “I Want to Hold Your Hand” was released in early December of 1963. Originally, it had been planned to release the song in the US in January of 1964 to coincide with an appearance on The Ed Sullivan Show, however a 14-year-old fan of The Beatles named Marsha Albert requested it on the radio a month earlier, triggering the United States phenomenon of Beatlemania, forcing the record label’s hand.
The demand for the song in the states was unprecedented for the time, with 10,000 copies being sold in New York City every hour just three days after the initial release. “I Want to Hold Your Hand” sold roughly five million copies just in America, and became the first US number one single for The Beatles.
According to Billboard, “I Want to Hold Your Hand” is the 48th biggest hit of all time in music history. For The Beatles, the single became their best-selling song in their entire catalog, selling more than 12 million copies worldwide.
The song is considered to be one that “electrified American pop.” Timelisted it among its 100 best songs of all time, and Rolling Stone ranked the song number 16 on its iconic “500 Greatest Songs of All Time.”
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